Stability tax on financiers (Well done Gordon Brown.) November 8, 2009
Posted by fleshisgrass in money.Tags: tax
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“It can not be acceptable that the benefits of success in this sector are reaped by the few but the costs of its failure are borne by all of us.
there must be a better economic and social contract between financial institutions and the public based on trust and a just distribution of risks and rewards”.
Anyway Gordon (finally, because he has long resisted such a tax) is another few steps towards redeeming himself after the 10p income tax band debacle. If you read the Nick Cohen piece below, you will find something else to blame him for, but for now I’m inclined to give him credit where credit is belatedly due.
The accelerators in the financial sector (whose champions seem to be US treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, Canadian finance minister Jim Flaherty and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund) may insist that financial policy must be expansionary until growth is with us. But here, in a nutshell is why global governments should adopt Gordon Brown’s progressive taxation of bank transaction profits (not, as far as I can see, a true Tobin tax, because it should encompass all buying and selling of currency and stakes, not just transnational ones). Stability, revenue and anti-poverty. More from Will Hutton.
So of course, somebody in my position of ignorance goes running to Stiglitz for commentary. Hmm, not much. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, bloke who wrote Black Swan? Nada.
(Ugh! These financial commentators have turdish websites. How can you know all they know and not realise that you have to syndicate? What else don’t they know?)
The Tax Justice Network has a little more – run out of time now.
An IMF study will report on feasibility of this stability tax next April. Good luck to Gordon – he will probably need it.
Bonus: Nick Cohen points out our collective failure to rail at financiers the way we rail at politicians.
Aside: the mum next door has been roaring at her two boys about homework for the past five minutes and the boys are keening.
Iran’s Green Movement November 7, 2009
Posted by fleshisgrass in islam.Tags: iran green movement
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This is an anaemic post about a subject I think about a lot but don’t seem to be able to do justice to here.
Mehdi Khalaji, writing for the Washington Institute, points to splits between Ahmadinejad’s opponent Mousavi, himself deeply conservative, and the young third generation of Iranians who comprise the majority of Iran’s Green Movement.
Hamid Tehrani posts videos on Global Voices Online.
And a predecessor, Tahirih, Persian martyr, who unveiled at a conference in 1848 and was later executed.
The Research Excellence Framework, and the notion of impact November 7, 2009
Posted by fleshisgrass in Higher Education.Tags: REF, Research Excellence Framework
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The Times Higher notes a split between university managers and academics with regards to the new Research Excellence Framework. The piece, and the comments below it, starkly show the difference of interests. Managers – some of whom met together under Chatham House rules to discuss the challenge – are briefed with taking a marketising government agenda to their academics. The indicator of performance (and therefore funding) is to be ‘impact’ and this will be measured in the short term. Academics point out that bad banks and politicians would do very well out of the new framework. A commenter called Pauline:
“What a shame Hegel, when filling in his AHRC funding application, couldn’t see into the future and claim that one day his lectures on history would feed into the forces that would eventually produce the Russian Revolution. Or that Wagner, applying for leave to write Parsifal, couldn’t assure the AHRC review panels that his ideas and music would one day be highly congenial to Hitler and thus help to bring about WW2! How’s that for Impact? Politicians would do rather well out of it. When you consider the Impact their decisions have, maybe funding councils should be asking us to prove our research will not have any life-threatening consequences and will be 100% harmless, benefiting only human knowledge and understanding.”
Here, in my view, is the most expressive and penetrating comment, by (Yale grad student and former Soviet, I think) Evelyn Preuss:
“oh, i’d love to rant about the esoteric nature of some of academia’s blossoms (which, at times, gives me the impression the author himself didn’t understand entirely what he wrote), the scholarly habit—or rather demand—of endlessly reciting maculature (after all, this defines the scholarliness of the product) and, yes, the limited reach—or let’s call it ‘impact’—of scholarly debate into stratas below and above in the caste system (hm, is that actually what the chatham house folks want?). and yes, i’d love to rave about that curious reflection of dominant ideology in scholarly production (of what use is academic freedom, if you don’t use it?!). but what it comes down to is whether my liberty is worth £3.50 today. what does putting an exchange value on ideas do to the ideas? ‘the human is only entirely human where he plays,’ an exceptionally hard-working academic with an immense impact on society decreed some two hundred years ago. play means being removed from the necessity of creating exchange value. if ideas such as liberty are what makes us human, shouldn’t we be happy to play? if play, in a societal form, is a waste of tax payers money, my liberty today is worth £3.50. with regard to the timing that ideas require to take some effect, some academics who made a indelible impact such as kant or frege were dead by the time their ideas became the coinage of discourse. the logic of the day trade, which makes any long-term investment seem non-sensical, surely would have killed them before they even set the pen to the paper. finally, what’s the impact of the current business valuation? the breathless imperative of market performance, which has emerged as the principal creation of economic value, has spelled ecological disaster for our planet (which, incidentally, is also an economic catastrophe) and might take humanity to the brink of extinction. is your life, or that of your children, worth £3.50, or how much that stock or bond has gained today (if it didn’t plunge to unforeseen depths, that is)? perhaps it’s time business learns from the humanities instead of trying to colonize the latter with its short-sighted assessments of value. the ideas of schiller, kant and frege are still around after two hundred years. yesterday’s profit evaporates with melting polar caps. the arctic ice is supposed to be gone next summer.”
Well said, Evelyn.
Is this Cultural Studies? November 6, 2009
Posted by fleshisgrass in vexations.2 comments
I just can’t get my head round it. Total blank (mind your epilepsy). Is it something more than ideas against hegemony? Sometimes I feel a bit anxious because I don’t understand it, just can’t at all get to grips with it as a discipline. Maybe this, by Michael Berube, is why: in his piece Cultural Studies comes across as a fragmented political project run by academics for academics which lacks academic method and enacts a set of prejudices.
Or maybe I’m just thick.
Defend Peter Tatchell November 1, 2009
Posted by fleshisgrass in green.Tags: Peter Tatchell
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Because he doesn’t stoop to exploit this country’s appalling defamation law, it falls to us to defend Peter Tatchell, Green Party speaker on Human Rights, from the smears of his ‘political’ (in the loosest, most dissolute sense of the word) opponents.
To quote a very ruffled David T, “A Left on which Peter is done over is a Left seriously fucked up”.
A Jesuit response to the BNP October 31, 2009
Posted by fleshisgrass in poetry.Tags: Gerard Manley Hopkins
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My favourite poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was born down the road in Stratford. Hard-peddling anti-materialist and English patriot, here he is in anticipation of Nick Griffin.
Glory be to God for dappled things -
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877
We ape humans October 31, 2009
Posted by fleshisgrass in animals, vegan.Tags: cruelty, death, Heston Blumenthal, Saturday Kitchen, savagery
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Humans are enormously sophisticated animals. We have enacted redistributive tax systems, social security and international law. It’s not that I’m uncomfortable with the distinction between human and animal. It’s not that I don’t love humans best.
But our behaviour towards animals is a profoundly bestial throwback, our own darkest animal tendency. It’s no coincidence that when we savage each other in genocide or ethnic cleansing, we call each other animals to legitimise the act. We treat non-human life so appallingly that calling a group of humans ‘untermensch’ or vermin is groundwork for driving them out or killing them. Our treatment of animals is a wide-open loophole in our ethical system. It is inhumane; it retards our pursuit of humanity.
Human treatment of animals bestialises human society. How can we be coherent about human rights while those of us who are already well-fed consume steak, latte, cheddar and fish filet, while we break the backs of mice, kill badgers in the interests of dairy farmers and (if the Conservatives gain power) hound foxes to death? On what do we base our protections? A sheep is more worked-out, capable of forming relationships and capable of suffering than a human infant. Until we have a system of justice which extends to all species, justice for our own species will languish, dependent on mental contortions and the turning of blind eyes – most of all to the hideous suffering congealed in the meat, cheese and egg on our plates.
Either suffering, slaughter, enslavement and physical coercion matter, or they don’t. Justice in our dealings with animals is necessary (though not necessarily sufficient) to justice for humanity.
Until then we’re savages with coiffures, more like the primates-in-drag in the PG Tips adverts than our idea of ourselves.
This post has been brought to you by my weekly recoil from the BBC’s deathly cookery show, Saturday Kitchen. As I watched the phenomenally wasteful art-chef Heston Blumenthal lavish more tender care and emotional investment on the corpse of a chicken than most chickens receive in their lifetimes, I began to feel quite unreal. Matt says we’ll look back on Saturday Kitchen the way we look back on the Black and White Minstrel Show today. Meanwhile it helps to keep in mind Manna’s transition to veganism and Intellectual Blackout’s participation in VeganMofo.
For the picture, hat-tip, Daniels Counter.
In the short term, it seems we’ve had it October 30, 2009
Posted by fleshisgrass in environment.Tags: actonco2, Ed Miliband
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Update Ed Miliband informs supporters of his action on climate change that sceptics are trying to ban this public info broadcast:
Try to put aside for a minute the crying rabbits and the breath-taking weirdness and fucked-upness of adults encouraging children to feel compassion towards animals which those same adults then consent to be needlessly slaughtered for food. I think that appealing to parents on behalf of their children, and parents appealing to people who don’t have children, and children appealing to adults and policy makers is appropriate and necessary. Scepticism about conserving a habitable planet is so beyond me that it is the polar opposite of what I’m worried about below.
I have the sense of being at the zenith of human existence, on the verge of precipitous decline related to our activities as a species. I sense war, retribution and fatal poverty in my lifetime as those of us in the shrinking habitable zone are forced to slaughter and beat back the migrating hoards who are trying to enter it. Whole civilisations will drown, ruin each other, or shrivel up and die, and the rest of us will find out the meaning of ‘Dark Ages’.
Here (via Matt) is Melvin Bragg trying to shrug off a conversation between his sedimentologist, paleontologist and paleoclimatologist guests after the recording of a recent edition of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time.
Hello
Still golden autumn days in London. Left Broadcasting House to go for a meeting at BAFTA in Piccadilly. Down Regent Street, across into Savile Row, through Burlington Arcade and met friends strolling along Piccadilly with all the nonchalance and leisure of a family in a 19th century novel. Sometimes even the West End of London can seem like a village. By the time I got to the meeting I had just about shaken down into the real world of time, but I must say that trying to crunch the millions of years, not so much into a pattern but into a digestible reality, had been a tough one.
The conclusion that all three of them came to in the chat afterwards was that the Earth will certainly cope. There’s no doubt that all the CO2 will be sucked down somehow or other and bury itself somewhere or other and, as happened about 50 million (or was it 550 million) years ago, things will change but continue. So, in the long term, the Earth’s great. In the short term, it seems we’ve had it. They agreed that it’s way too late to cut down CO2 emissions. There is a possibility of cleaning CO2 out of the atmosphere. For this we need nuclear reactors to power the scrubbers which will put CO2 back in the pits of Earth, such as those in the North Sea which were resultant from the oil industry. So there we are. That’s about as cheerful as it gets. When I challenged, or rather asked, Jane Francis how long she thought we’d got, she said a few years. But, as I said on the programme once or twice, what’s a few years to geologists? She muttered something about hundreds but refused to be committed on such a narrow basis.
Richard Corfield suddenly expressed a passion for the works of John Wyndham. He gave us a potted biog. It appears that Wyndham had written bodice rippers before the Second World War, but after the war came back to write what Corfield thinks are three great books based on science – The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes and The Midwich Cuckoos. I say based on science, by which I mean acceptable and even exciting to people who know a lot about science.
Jane Francis cheered us all up by saying that the ice sheets are melting, but there’s a sudden tipping point where the meltdown begins quite quickly – by which she means it takes a hundred years or so. I gather that she thinks we’re near that.
It’s just as well that I was going to have a bite and a glass with a pal for lunch.
Best wishes
Melvyn Bragg
Theories of behaviour change are quite clear: if you want people to change, you have to give us a mixture of hope, opportunity, reason and information. Tell us something unavoidable is on the horizon and we just carpe diem, hell for leather. But sometimes, on the other hand, we require something to focus the mind.
Porgy and Bess at the Royal Festival Hall October 28, 2009
Posted by fleshisgrass in art.1 comment so far
First ever night at the opera – the Cape Town Opera production was gorgeously and very moving; what was disappointing was that you can’t sing along (not done, and too far from the dot matrix display of the lyrics).
The story of Porgy and Bess is one of disadvantage, damage, hedonism and hard knocks. Crippled Porgy is an island of inner resourcefulness; around him nature and humankind fuse into an encompassing hostile environment which besets the community on Catfish Row. God is there, fortune is there, but inner qualities – principles, strength of character – are the only resources these people have to draw on.
Background to the production at The Independent, The Times, The Scotsman and The Guardian.
My favourite song is the mourning of Clara and Jake, ‘Clara, Clara, don’t you be downhearted‘ (be patient for the singing to begin).
Clara, Clara, don’t you be downhearted
Clara, Clara, don’t you be sad and lonesome
Jesus is walking on the water
Rise up and follow him home.
Oh lord, oh my Jesus
Rise up and follow him home, follow him home.
Jake, Jake, don’t you be downhearted
Jake, Jake, don’t you be sad and lonesome
Jesus is walking on the water
Rise up and follow him home.
Oh lord, oh my Jesus
Rise up and follow him home, follow him home.
Machiavellians at meetings October 28, 2009
Posted by fleshisgrass in vexations.3 comments
When I go for a meeting, it’s usually in a cooperative, facilitative, sympathetic and principled frame of mind, and I have had good experiences at meetings on the whole (with some notable exceptions associated with certain colleagues’ vanity or thirst for power).
Read Venkatesh Rao’s nasty, insightful piece on the 15 laws of meeting power, and from the bottom of that, a link to Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power. This kind of thing:
“A meeting is a partly adversarial setting, and pure “active listening” is not enough. By the power of listening, I mean the power that lies in consciously keeping track of what was said and using it to make the points you want to make. The average short-term memory of a group stretches just to the very last thing that was said. Most people react only to this last thing, and don’t consciously attempt to remember anything before that. The canny listener tries his best to remember the highlights of everything he has heard and seen, for later use.
I learned this when I served on an interview panel interviewing high school students for a summer scholarship. A more experienced interviewer remarked that one of the signs of sophistication she looked for in a candidate was an instance of referring back to something that was said more than 10 minutes ago.
A corollary to the power of listening is the power of citation. Using what was said before gives you a lot of control. It is even more powerful if you remember who said it and what the exact words were, and can quote. Why? Because you automatically demonstrate that you were paying attention, making you more credible than others. Plus, you can temporarily borrow the “usual” supporters of the people you quote, because you did them the honor of remembering what their side said.”
It gets much more manipulative and ruthless than this. This is seductive stuff, but it’s also rotten. I mean, if a group has a poor collective memory then find a way to compensate for this which keeps concepts and arguments alive in its consciousness. Don’t exploit people’s weaknesses when those weaknesses may be serious handicaps for reaching the optimal decision for your organisation. Don’t be so arrogant as to assume that you’re not the bad apple. Don’t toy the deficits of meeting participants for your own amusement. Don’t be contemptuous of people with smaller intellects than you.
